Peter's Life

Our group had to do a bit of prep before this class, I was having a bit of a hard time fitting what I wanted to say into my 1 - 1.30 minute slot, trying to condense a brief history of technology so far into that time frame was quite a difficult task. I managed it in the end however I would have liked to go a little more in depth on the subject. Once it was all recorded I uploaded it to the google drive. I have to give credit to Hugh Kavanagh who was the member of my group who stitched all our videos together into the final presentation.

This was our last class before the presentations so it was our last class to ask any queries that we had about the presentation, this was a comforting class for me as John went through thouroghly how to show slides on the walls of the classroom. My group had decided to create a video for our presentation so John explained that we could share the link in chat, we thought that this would be easier as showing the slides on the wall of the class seemed a bit unpredictable at times. Later in the week my group chatted about who wanted to talk about what in the presentation so we came up with a running order so everyone could figure out what order people would speak in. Next we decided to set up a google drive folder which we gave everyone in the group access to so that we all had a place to store our files that we wanted to include in the presentation. Finally we made a rough estimate for how long each persons speech should last and shared it with the group. 

This week we were joined by guest lecturar Glenn Loughran who was a lecturer on Sherkin Island, to be honest I had never even heard of this place before and I had no clue whether it was an island off the coast of Ireland or somewhere else. I looked it up and it's aparently an island off Cork, I had however been to Cape Clear before when I was younger but I was unaware that it was close to Sherkin Island. I think that this class was a perfect example of how technology has changed our lives, to think that the lecturer was sitting somewhere on Sherkin Island whilst we were all scattered around Dublin, you can really see the opportunities for this kind of thing, could we have TED talks held in Second Life? Certainly it would be a lot cheaper than flying these people out to these events. We discussed a reading "The ones who walk away from Omelas" I kind found this hard hard to understand as I was unsure of the context that I was reading it in, what was I supposed to take f

The group met once again on Facebook this week to discuss our presentation, we have found that this has been the easier way to stay in contact in the group as people don't need to log into Second Life to attend the meetings. Where as you need to be at a computer to use Second Life, with Facebook everyone has it on their phones so they can have access it in more situations, for example someone can be waiting for a bus and still contribute but taking out your laptop at a bus stop might not be the most convenient thing. Also when we talk on Facebook members of the group who were unable to attend can still view the conversation at a later stage and catch up on what is being discussed so everyone basically has the full minutes to the meeting, which is really handy. This week in our meeting we decided that we would work on the Virtual Reality theme.

In todays class we talked about privacy and sharing information online. We reminisced back when social media was becoming popular, users did not take much care as to what information they posted online. We were not really aware of the knock on effect this could have on our online and also in some cases online lives. Over time we became more aware of how information stored online could be used in a malicious fashion against us. For some users of social media they would want only their close friends and maybe family to be able to view their posts, however not all users are so private. It got me thinking that many users of social media are actually using it as a tool to promote some kind of brand whether it is themselves, musicians for example or a business. In these cases the users want their posts to reach as many people as possible, in order to promote their brands. These users need to take extra caution with the information they are releasing to the public. In this day and age informa

Today we talked about our online presence and how we present ourselves to viewers, we shape our online profiles to show the best most interesting side of ourselves. With how blurred the lines are between the online world and the real world, I wonder how much of peoples online personas is attaching itself to their real life personality? Whilst most of us would prefer to keep some kind of anonymity with our online profiles letting others see what we want them to see, companies such as Google are making this more difficult to achieve in modern times. Is it a good idea for our boss to see what we get up to on the weekend? In modern times we have to be more aware with what information we release to the online world, where as back say five years ago we rarely thought about it, we have realised that once we publish something online we have very little control if any as to what happens to that information or who has access to it. After class our group chatted more on Facebook about the prese

Before class a couple of us managed to meet up to discuss our grou p pro ject, we talked about the future of the workplace and what kind of effect future  technologys would have on it. We also discussed what form of media we could use to deliver it, slides, video, pictures, sound etc. I wasn't sure if the presentation had to be related to the course that we were studying (Visual Communication) for example, how will new technology effect the field of graphic design and visual communication, so I said that I would ask the lecturer in class to clarify this. Other members of the group were discussing the roll of automation using technology in the workplace, what percentage of our jobs will be automated by technology in the future? could we find ourselves out of work after being replaced by a robot? I suggested that we look at online companies such as those that provide services such as online shopping. What would these be like in the future? would we be able to do our shopping without

Today we mostly discussed our group project most of us had read through the brief but many of us still had queries as to what was expected from us. This project brief is a group orientated project and it will test whether or not we can work as one cohesive group. However he did state that if the group was having difficulties we should record and reflect on them, could we have done anything different as a group? is there anything that would have helped the group dynamic? This was comforting as even if we failed in some areas it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing as we could analyse what went wrong and try to learn something from it. We would also be marked individually on our input to the group which also put me at ease as in my experience it can be quite a task to get everybody working together as one cohesive group. This was apparent to me as my group was unable to meet before this class, myself included, although we have have our facebook group set up so we at least have some fo

This week our lecturer covered in more detail what the “Elevator Pitch” would consist of, as the majority of the class were still unsure what exactly it would entail. Personally I thought that we had to do it from the perspective of what course we were doing in D.I.T. My understanding was that I would try and sell myself as a visual communicator, that the person in the lift might be someone who was in the position to hire me for some work. However the lecturer explained that the topic could be anything and that it was going to be a fairly informal affair, the idea was just to get participants in the class to get used to talking and presenting in the virtual environment. Next the class was split into groups, I was assigned to the red group. The group project was to give a presentation in the virtual environment, this would be based on how we think technology and virtual environments will effect jobs and the working environment in the future. During the class we discussed the pros

This was my first time logging into Second Life, I'd never heard of this virtual world before but I was intrigued to see what it was all about. Once the software was finished downloading and installing I was greeted with a screen where I was given options to customise my character. I didn't personally think that there was that much choice and they all seems to be fantasy styled options. I would have personally preferred if I could have styled myself in more of a real life style but I ended up just choosing a wizard type avatar as none of the avatar styles really caught my attention.  I then spent a little time trying to figure out the avatar controls, it was almost time for the class, I could hear the lecturer talking but I couldn't see which avatar was his. It turned out that I didn't realise that the classroom was above where I was standing so I could hear the class but I wasn't in it. Once I figured this out I made my way upstairs to the class, after I f